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by undo123 2001 days ago
This is fascinating. In short, the vision processing aspect still worked quite well, wrt. drivable area, lane lines, pedestrians, etc. Room to improve, for certain, but I’m not seeing a fundamental flaw here.

What’s left is the driving part, the “how to make the car follow this path” part. I predict this part will be ridiculously good once Tesla gets around to it. Imagine the traction control in your car, now with immediate-response electric motors, and it knows where it wants to go in 3d space (not just “driver is turning wheel to the right”, but actually knowing the arc to follow).

Exciting times.
3 comments
tsimionescu 2001 days ago
> What’s left is the driving part, the “how to make the car follow this path” part. I predict this part will be ridiculously good once Tesla gets around to it.

So they are almost there with the part others barely even have to do, while the part everyone else is working on will eb ridiculously good once they get round to it?

I'm skeptical.

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johntb86 2001 days ago
Yeah, I'm curious after seeing the video how much the control could be corrected by a simple change to the car's software. Do Teslas have a sophisticated-enough physics model that you could reduce some constant for the coefficient of friction enough that it would be able to tell that it can't safely drive at 30mph or take those corners at 15mph?

Or is the software just hardcoded to assume that if it turns the steering wheel at a specific angle that the car will move a specific amount in that direction?

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undo123 2001 days ago
What I’m seeing is a model that has no concept of slippage. I suspect what they’ll do is have the fleet collect data to predict that coefficient of friction.

Seems plausible that they could ask all the cars this winter to report instances of wheel slippage, accompanied by video rewound with the spot the wheel slipped on annotated. Could have a prediction for mu at each point on the road ahead of the car. All the pieces are there, it’s just math and NN work.

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FartyMcFarter 2001 days ago
> the vision processing aspect still worked quite well, wrt. drivable area

The moment in the video just after 7m0s seems to contradict this.

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